


Executive Tampering

by Lilliburlero



Category: The Marlows - Antonia Forest, The Pursuit of Love Series - Nancy Mitford
Genre: 1920s, Class Differences, Foley Effects, Gen, Period Typical Attitudes, Period-Typical Racism, Pranks and Practical Jokes, Pre-Canon, Racism, Racist Language
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-19
Updated: 2016-08-19
Packaged: 2018-08-07 07:01:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,540
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7704934
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilliburlero/pseuds/Lilliburlero
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Which it is the story of the sugar in the petrol.</p><p>*</p><p>Content note: strongly racist language, racist attitudes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Executive Tampering

**Author's Note:**

  * For [fengirl88](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fengirl88/gifts).



> #5 in a series of fics inspired by lines of poetry obtained using a sort-of _sortes Virgilianae_ method. fengirl88 drew 'where executives/ Would never want to tamper, flowing south', from W.H. Auden's 'In Memory of W.B. Yeats' which I shamelessly used to write a fic that I've wanted to write for some time now.

The first time that Sybilla Foley inquired of her younger stepsons how they proposed to pass their vacation, she received three such hostile grey stares, set in faces iterated as if to illustrate male adolescent development in a medical textbook, as to deter a lesser woman from breakfast-table conversation for years to come. Her disinclination to be aggrieved upon discovering that their replies were outrageous misinformation, instead countering with false intelligence of her own, eased considerably her acceptance into the household. By the following summer, mutual misdirection concerning holiday itineraries was firmly embedded in family tradition. But her announcement that her cousin Lord Alconleigh was to join their luncheon party on Saturday next was met, by Humphrey at least, with open scorn.

‘Billie, how divinely transparent, darling. You can do better than that. Try us again with a real one.’ 

Sir Charles made a small uvular adjustment to indicate to his third son that the verbal mannerisms acceptable in the St George Restaurant were superfluous to Devon. 

‘Why isn’t it a real one?’ Lewis enquired, attacking a kipper. 

Humphrey rolled his eyes. ‘The two things that every schoolboy—with apparently one exception—knows about Alconleigh is that he hunts his children and he simply doesn’t go to other people’s houses. Especially,’ he said with a sweet smile rather wasted on his father’s perusal of the parliamentary sketch, ‘not divorced people’s houses.’ 

‘Don’t be illogical, Huffy,’ Sybilla said. ‘If he doesn’t go to people’s houses at all he can’t be especial about the divorced ones. But as a matter of fact none of it’s true, except the bit about hunting the children, but they’re all practically grown-up now, and anyway it was only in fun, they adored it. All Matthew ever does is make a whinnying noise when divorcées say they’re engaged, which _is_ a bit awful of them, even you must admit.’ 

‘I don’t see I must admit anything,’ Humphrey pouted. ‘Hypocrisy’s an art, just like anything else, and the old windbag’s frightfully bad at it. His sister’s on her fourth husband—makes Ma look like Patient Grisel—’ 

‘No Bolters at the breakfast table,’ said Sir Charles, with the minatory affability of the truly despotic chairman. 

‘Well, anyway, I shan’t be breaking cutlets with the old halibut. Freddie Middletoun’s motoring over for the weekend and I’ll be taken up showing him the country.’ 

‘Oh, don’t ever say “weekend” in front of Matthew, he hates it. And “lunch”, he detests “lunch.”’ 

Rupert quelled his younger brother’s incipient witticism with a violent hack to the shin. 

‘Lewis, don’t _writhe_ like that, it looks so troubling,' Sybilla said. 'Shall I tell Mrs Peterson to make up a room for your friend, Humphrey?’ 

‘Is this Middletoun Jock Middletoun’s son?’ asked Sir Charles. 

‘No, he’s staying at the Majestic. He was bringing a friend, but she—’ Humphrey deployed the pronoun in a deliberate, deceptive manner not unlike a prep school boy’s slow bowling, ‘I mean it fell through, but he thought he’d keep the booking. Yes, he is. Not getting on awfully well with his guv'nor at the moment, though.’ 

‘Mm—we’re on a committee together. Imagine it’s even more entertaining getting Jock to spend his _own_ money. No reason he shouldn’t come to luncheon, is there, Bill?’ 

‘None at all. I’d been rather worried about what to do with poor Monica Pelham’s daughter, but she can be quite decorative if she’s stimulated. Does he play tennis?’ 

‘No. I mean, I don’t know. Yes. But, look, I say, it isn’t—’ 

‘Never mind,’ Sybilla murmured, serenely repressive. ‘Perhaps you’d give me his address after breakfast. Have some more coffee, and yes, I suppose you may smoke, everyone’s finished.’ 

Rupert, who had been observing his brother’s discomfiture with an apparent dispassion most unlike Lewis’s note-taking manner, interjected stolidly, ‘Is it Saturday all this is happening? Treviss is coming on Saturday.’ 

‘I know, my dear. His mother wrote to me. He gets in on the eleven four, and he can come up by cab.’ 

‘I mean, it leaves poor Lewis without a friend, though, doesn’t it? Do you actually have any friends, Lewis?’ 

Swallowing the last of his kipper, Lewis considered this interesting specimen of open malice. ‘Not at school. It’s full of very foolish small boys. You probably remember private school. Or maybe you don’t. But here there’s Rob, of course.’ Blinking innocently up at his elders, he bent to massage his shin. 

‘Good God,’ breathed Humphrey, who despite his eschewal of its military and naval traditions was by some distance the most conventional member of his family. ‘You can’t mean to—Pa, you can’t let him. It’s practically cruelty to dumb animals.’ 

‘Oh, Alconleigh’s reputation is much exaggerated. I have it on very good authority that he’s read _The Call of the Wild_ as well.’ 

‘Honestly, Pa. I mean the Anquetil boy, of course.’ 

‘Again, on the contrary. Robert Anquetil is a very eloquent, bright little fellow. Exceptional, in fact. Usually rather a shame, when working people produce a sport of nature like that, but I think since the war it’s been possible to do more for them.’ 

‘You know that’s not what I mean.’ 

‘What _do_ you mean, Humphrey?’ Rupert asked. He was feeling outclassed by his younger brother, a disagreeable sensation which had become too frequent this vac. 

‘The imbecile pose doesn’t suit you, Rupert, give it up. But since you force me to say it—’ At that moment Humphrey looked more the prefect and captain of the Second XI who had gone up almost two years ago to Oriel than he ever had since. ‘It’s pretty average unkind giving a fisherman’s brat the impression he can mix with our friends, without pretending we just haven’t noticed he’s half nigger as well.’ 

‘Quarter,’ Lewis said punctiliously. ‘His mother was a _mulatta_. From Spanish Town. And she died of Spanish Flu.’ 

‘I _hadn’t_ , actually,’ Sybilla said candidly. ‘Noticed, I mean. A lot of the local people have roughly his colouring, and with the French name, I assumed—’ 

‘I don’t think we can rely on one of the realm’s most notorious racialists having quite your powers of obliviousness, my dear. So perhaps not, Lewis—Bill darling, don’t mount it: I do happen to agree that he should spend more time with his contemporaries, and there’s an unfortunate dearth of families who are more or less all right and who have children of his age, but there are limits to what you can inflict on your guests.’ 

‘Nonsense,’ insisted Sybilla. ‘He’s only a child of ten.’ 

‘ _Eleven_ ,’ Lewis protested, his own seniority implicitly impugned. ‘Nearly _twelve._ ’ 

‘And Matthew just prefers people to be English, you know,’ she went on, ‘Which is perfectly understandable, and one can’t say Robert isn’t. You could gut sardines with that Devon accent, for one thing, thank goodness Lewis hasn’t picked it up again this summer. You may ask him to come, Lewis, if his father says he may.’ 

Sir Charles smiled to himself: he had always said that the failure of his first marriage was down to a lack, rather than an excess of unpredictability. Constance changed her mind without cease, but one could always follow its workings. In his placid, unlettered second wife he had found a casual caprice to equal his own. 

* 

Robert stood at the window of Mariners’ old schoolroom, looking down over the terraced garden and beyond it, Fitton’s Creek. It was an airless, hazy day, but that was not the only reason he felt uncomfortable. Lady Foley had tried not to look horrified at what, in the Anquetil household, passed for church- and party-going best (some instinct told him it would not be useful to explain that he had not attended Sunday worship since his grandmother’s death a year before, and the clothes in which he used to go to Mass were hopelessly outgrown) but it was embarrassing, all the same. Although he and Lewis were the same height to within an eighth of an inch, he discovered upon dressing in the shirt and suit with which he was hurriedly presented that they were not at all the same shape. The shorts sagged in the backside and the sleeves stopped short of his wristbone. There was nothing to be done for his boots, whose chipped, cracked leather was unsalvageable by any amount of polish: his broad feet could not be crammed into Lewis's shoes, but he could've put to sea in Rupert's. 

That latter young man and his friend Treviss came into view on the path below, arm-in-arm. Their singing voices drifted up to the open window: _most immoral la-dy, she’s a most immoral la-dy, as she lay beneath the lily-white sheets—_ Robert’s face grew warm. He knew that one; he knew a lot worse, as a matter of fact, and aided by external applications of Miss Loverage’s ruler, was developing a sturdy internal sense of what matter heard on the deck of a smack could safely be repeated on the asphalt of the playground. But Rupert, from whose impassive good looks and deliberate movements Robert found it difficult to tear his eye—though, of course, he thought loyally, Lewis would be every bit as handsome and probably more so when he reached the impossible pinnacle of sixteen—Rupert should be purer, somehow, not a silly, sniggering schoolboy no better than himself or— 

‘What are you doing mooning about here, Rob?’ 

‘Waiting for you. What took you so long, anyway? Taking your curl-papers out, were you?’ 

‘Huh. You can talk.’ Lewis clapped him on the back of the head, releasing hair very uncertainly subjugated by water and no comb into its natural state of being all on end. ‘What do you want to do? The gong’s not for ages.’ 

‘Crow’s nest?’ 

‘I don’t know why you like going up there. It’s handy for some things, but it’s so beastly quaint. The Victorians were simply too feeble for words: imagine putting up a tripper’s toy telescope when you own an actual lighthouse. I say, I’ve got something rather decent to show you.’ 

The oak-panelled walls of the schoolroom were painted a dull, utilitarian green, with an off-white picture rail running around the top of the panelling, from which hung framed prints of an improving and educational nature. Lewis lifted down one of these. ‘Here, hold that for a minute.’ 

Robert took it from him. It was not in fact a print at all, but a map of Europe embroidered in silk thread, faded but still legible. Most of the names were familiar—he was good at Geography—but some were odd and old-fashioned: ‘Little Tartary’, ‘Turkey-in-Europe’. North of Sweden and Norway was marked ‘MARE GLACIALE’. Glacial was ice, and ‘mare’ was like _la mer_ , so a sea of ice, an eerie, beguiling notion, though no stranger than the truth, really. A legend at the top left read ‘Done at Miss Powell’s Boarding School, Plymouth, by Elizabeth Hawkins, 1797.’ 

‘Who was Elizabeth Hawkins?’ 

‘What?’ There was a keyhole in the panel that the sampler had covered. Lewis fished in his pocket and took out a key on a string. 

‘She made this.’ 

‘Oh,’ Lewis said into the hidden cupboard. ‘Humfrey married a Miss Hawkins.’ He said it as if the wedding had taken place last week. ‘I expect it was her.’ He retrieved a wooden box, darkened with age and nearly as big as the small recess itself. 

‘But—’ Robert frowned down at the date. ‘It says 1797, and she was still at school then. I thought—’ He bit his lip, then found an innocuous way to say it, ‘Sir Humfrey was earlier.’ 

‘Put that mouldy old thing _down_.’ Robert obediently leaned it against the wall. Lewis carried the box over to one of the desks. ‘She was Humfrey’s second wife, if you must know. She married him just a couple of years before he went quite potty and started living in the lighthouse all the time.’ His voice sounded small and grating, like pebbles under a withdrawing wave. ‘Which makes her Pa’s great-grandmother. He _says_ he remembers being held up to kiss her on her deathbed.’ 

Over twenty years later, sitting in the study of Sir Charles’s townhouse with a crystal tumbler in his hand, Robert would think suddenly and inconsequently of that girl, married out of the schoolroom to an eccentric who became in short order a lunatic, who survived her husband by almost sixty years and presided over the retreat of her family into nearly a century’s embittered isolation. At the time, though, he thought only how queer it was that a person he could see and talk to had actually seen and touched the person who, back in the eighteenth century, had stitched the ornate lettering reading MARE GLACIALE. It was like that poem they’d learnt for Recitation, which until then he hadn’t been very impressed by (he hated it when poets got soppy about the sea): ‘And the whole deck put on its leaves again.’ 

Lewis, having excavated various strata of Foley—his own treasure of fossils, flints and feathers, his eldest brother’s service whistle, a bandolier strap with C.H.F. LADYSMITH 1900 crudely hacked into the leather, the tarnished remains of an epaulette, a broken-stemmed clay pipe, a black-enamelled ring with a gilt Gothic F on the bevel and the hoop inscribed HUMF. FOLEY. BART. OB: 12th Sept. 1809: AE: 51—held out for Robert’s inspection a frail, yellowed strip of coarse paper, about nine inches long and three wide. He took it gravely. At the top was a blurry picture of a lighthouse with a row of boats at its foot and a tiny figure tumbling from the lantern-room roof. 

‘I found it in the penny box on that junk stall on Byfleet market. Read it,’ Lewis commanded. 

‘I am reading it.’ 

‘Out loud.’ 

Robert loathed reading aloud: his perfectly ordinary voice went dull and hollow and he faltered at about every fourth word. Doing things he was bad at in front of Lewis made him feel squirmy and vexed. He didn’t mind Lewis being _better_ , which he was at most things requiring agility or sheer blind nerve, as Robert outclassed him in strategy and stamina, but he liked to maintain some kind of minimal competence. 

Robert gulped mutinously. ‘If anyone it should be you. He’s your person.’ 

‘I want to hear you do it.’ 

‘We get enough of blasted poetry at school without having it in the holidays.’ 

‘It’s not _poetry_. Just rhyming. You could sing it—’ 

‘All right, all right. Do I have to do the title?’ 

‘ _All of it_.’ 

‘Falf—oh, the effs are esses, aren’t they? False lights, or the Wracker Wrackt. P. Nettleton, printer, 57 Market-Street, Plymouth. 

‘It’s a merry life but a short one, boys  
‘Luring gallant ships to wreck,  
‘Drink to me then, for the bold fishermen  
‘Are coming to stretch my neck.  


‘Sir Rupert was my grandsire,  
‘He raised a lighthouse fine,  
‘The high winds toil’d, and the tall waves roil’d,  
‘And it tumbled into the brine.  


‘It’s a merry life but a short one,—et cet. I’m not doing the chorus each time,’ Robert said fiercely. ‘You can blooming well whistle.’

‘My father old Sir Humfrey,  
‘The day he dandled me,  
‘My doom he knew, his wits it—o’erthrew,  
‘For Foleys die at sea.  


‘That goodly dame my mother,  
‘The day she cradled me,  
‘Wept full sore, for the son she bore,  
‘For Foleys die at sea.  


‘I grew up tall and handsome,  
‘And came to man’s ef—estate,  
‘With rakes and wh—oh. I didn’t know it had a double-you. Laid waste my stores,  
‘But—ne’er forgot my fate.’  


All those unnecessary apostrophes, o’ers and ne’ers, Robert thought crossly, aware that this incomprehensible poetic practice was not the true source of his embarrassment. 

‘I set a light upon the tower,  
‘That made a ship to founder,  
‘To enrich myself with bloody pelf,  
‘I robbed her when I’d drowned her.  


‘Come all you rogues and wastrels  
‘Give o’er your revel-rout,  
‘My sands are run, my life is done,  
‘And my false lights put out.’ 

Struck as if someone had boxed his ear, Robert hardly had time to be grateful to the gong for rescuing him from astonished tears. Because he regarded his own inconvenient emotions in much the same light as the seasickness of others, it took him some years to recognise that what had moved him was not sympathy for Fabian Foley, but the impersonal, inscrutable simplicity of doggerel verse, that transformed a despicable character into a grand archetype and an eternal theme. Lewis snatched back the ballad slip, and repacked the box all anyhow. The letters painted on its side, which Robert had assumed some sort of classification for storage or transport, suddenly snapped into meaning—F. deN. F., _his_ box. Lewis pushed it back into the cavity and locked the door. Feeling latecome and impossibly dim, Robert helped him hang and straighten the embroidery on its suspending chain. 

* 

Lord Alconleigh arrived forty-five minutes late. His bad mood was not the direct result of the mishap that was its originating cause; until Humphrey Foley and Freddie Middletoun passed in Freddie’s MG two-seater, he had been enjoying the first ever vindication of his cherished dictum, for many years enjoined upon his household to unspoken resentment, that one should always depart fifteen minutes earlier than the earliest necessary hour in case of puncture. The young men pulled up and offered their assistance; the Alconleigh chauffeur being competent to change a tyre on his own, Freddie offered Lady Alconleigh a lift to Mariners, so that she at least might not be inconvenienced. 

Humphrey’s conversation was not calculated to please Lord Alconleigh, and it did not, but he had enough common sense to comply when a lord told him to shut up. They stood supervising in silence the driver’s exertions with the spare tyre, and all might have been well but for the recondite location of Mariners, a challenge even for strangers possessed of a sense of direction. The M-type sailed past, Lady Alconleigh slightly buffeted but benignly unperturbed in the passenger seat. Her husband’s taurine forward motion caused young Middletoun to take fright and depress the accelerator; Lord Alconleigh roared, ‘The sewer’s running off with Sadie, God rot him!’ and charged in game but futile pursuit. Recovering himself, Freddie stopped the sports-car a short distance further on and got out to meet his doom, with something of the air of a roué who seeks to redeem a squandered life with courage on the scaffold. 

Humphrey, who had failed to outpace Lord Alconleigh over two hundred yards, attempted with a desperate gesture to interpose himself between baronial invective and the person of his friend. Owing to a half-dried puddle, he skidded from the posture adopted by David’s intervening Sabine into something more ambitiously acrobatic, which would have had less radical consequences for his dignity had he not declared Oxford bags fit only for barrow boys and eliminated them from his summer wardrobe. The peculiar acoustic of a narrow hedge-lined lane amplified the noise of tearing flannel into a shriek of extraordinary pitch and penetration, not unlike the descent of a shell; startled, Lord Alconleigh lost his footing and stumbled forward onto Humphrey’s outstretched hand. Humphrey’s ten and a half stone being unequal to contention with Lord Alconleigh’s sixteen, he toppled sideways, in his fall entangling his arm with Freddie’s knees, bringing the other young man down on top of the prone peer. 

‘I beg your pardon, my lord,’ said the chauffeur, who had advanced on the heap of gentlemen unobserved, ‘The defective tyre has been replaced and we may proceed at your lordship’s convenience.’ 

Lady Alconleigh, meanwhile, always maintained she had seen and heard nothing at all. 

*

And so that afternoon was the first of a number of occasions, in a moderately crowded life, on which Robert Anquetil found himself a social success. It set a precedent in that the triumph was wholly unpremeditated: he had no gift to identify and replicate his own charms, as a few undergraduate attempts to capitalise upon them mortifyingly demonstrated. 

The episode in the lane had prejudiced Lord Alconleigh against his hosts and everything to do with with them. The guests at a party being perforce connected with the people giving it, this meant that he spoke to no-one but his wife, inconveniently situated at the other end of the long luncheon table, and Cecily Pelham, to whom he considered it his chivalrous duty, superseding her lamentable judgement in accepting a Foley invitation, to effect rescue from corruption by Freddie Middletoun. She, intimidated by a series of barked statements about Galli-Curci, steeplechasing and the lavatorial arrangements of the House of Lords, merely blinked at him with her crustacean eyes. It was all rather a drag on general gaiety, but at last the company trailed outside, bursting sporadically into nervous hilarity. 

Robert, whose short course of life had only very recently begun to include some casual instruction in the summer games played by polite society, was obliged to sit with with the old people, they in deckchairs and he on a rug. He contrived to endear himself to Lord Alconleigh with the sort of soothing, wholly informational conversation (mostly about fish) that was, did Robert only know it, the only antidote to one of his great rages. 

Lady Foley touched her husband’s forearm and nodded at the scene. 

‘Good Lord,‘ Sir Charles said softly. ‘And call’d mine Percy, his Plantagenet. The English gentry is finished, Bill, just as I’ve always said. Another war down the line and that boy will be Prime Minister.’ 

‘God forbid,’ said Sybilla, not quite knowing whether she meant a war or Robert’s elevation to the premiership, or which would be more destructive to the national fabric. 

Robert had also begun to relax. He had passed a nervous time at table, watching and copying what people did with their knives and forks, hoping that he would not be obliged to speak too much in the accent uncertainly acquired through studious imitation of Lewis and for which he half-despised himself, trying not to catch the eye of the servant he knew by sight as one of the Moxon girls. He hadn’t entirely fancied his chances at school on Monday morning if it got out that he’d been to eat his dinner at Mariners, though which of that shower would turn down the chance of luscious food like this (it was plainer than he’d expected, but tastier) he would’ve liked to know. The young lady of seventeen to his left, indignant at being placed next to such a very little boy, had paid him no attention (could have been worse, she might have found him _sweet_ ); the old one to his right, whose complexion against her frock reminded him of a Christmas orange in its yellow tissue paper, told him off for sprinkling salt on his food (why was it on the table, then?), and remarked to her other neighbour that they do pick up the most impossible things at their privates, ridiculous really, that we entrust responsibility for their comportment to sort of person who becomes a schoolmaster. The man, replying with his belief that the home environment was more important, managed to capitalise all the initial letters of his words despite his low, bored tones. Robert thought of his Home Environment and felt a bit like an impostor and a bit like a spy. This old gentleman, in contrast, though he had appeared fearsome in the dining room and made a disconcerting noise with his teeth as he listened to you, was quite sensible. He even managed to make a correction kindly. 

‘I dare say one gets used to “sir”—I know I did in the Army—but a lord is—’ he looked thoughtful for a moment, ‘always Lord Whoever He Is, you know.’ 

Robert realised, with a small jolt, that he was saying roughly the same thing as the Christmas-orange lady had said, just in a nicer way. 

‘I’m sorry, s—Lord Alconleigh.’ 

‘Quite all right. That fella is a filthy hound, letting the girl take all the volleys like that.’ The couple in question, which included the haughty girl he’d sat next to at the meal, were playing against Rupert and another lady, and beating them rather roundly, a painful circumstance which Robert was trying not to notice too much. ‘Why don’t you play lawn tennis?’ 

‘I’ve only just started to learn. I wouldn’t be good enough to play with anyone here.’ 

‘Hmph. Go to school, don’t you? Not _delicate_ , or anything?’ 

‘Yes—sort of. No. Not at all.’ Robert tugged at his sleeves and prayed fervently that no further enquiry would be made. Lewis came bounding over from the croquet lawn, crowing incomprehensibly about peeling things. ‘—You’re never about when you’re wanted, Anquetil,’ he said pettishly, meaning that Robert had not been there to see him win something. 

Lewis made a small, dutiful bow to the Alconleighs. His eyes had the same hard, ignoring look as they had when, being driven through Oldport with his mother, he had passed Robert and some other boys from the elementary school in the street. Robert had been glad of it, really. The bruises he’d have got fighting his way out of a salutation from the Foleys’ Rolls would’ve hurt a lot more than the slight. 

‘Anquetil,’ mused Lord Alconleigh. ‘Of course. Couldn’t place it, at first, but it all makes sense now. I knew your mother. Chevron’s funny little daughter. You remember, Sadie? Looked like a marionette, but she had a mind of her own all right, if you could call it a mind.’ 

Lewis clapped his hand to his mouth. Lady Alconleigh made a small cautionary noise. 

‘I didn’t know poor Viola had a son,' she said. 'Of course, we all rather—well.’ 

Robert looked over at Sir Charles and Lady Foley. They seemed intent upon the last game of the set, but something about their faces in profile told him they had overheard, and meant to listen to how he handled it. Lewis was clearly useless, having reverted to the bug-eyed state of a Junior Infant. He was on his own. 

‘My mother’s dead,’ he said. ‘And her name wasn’t Viola. I’m afraid you must be mistaken, Lord Alconleigh.’ His voice sounded scratchy and piping, but the assumed vowels had held. He took a deep breath and tried to tuck his disreputable boots out of sight under a fold of rug. 

‘Oh, good. Made the most unwise marriage. Some polar explorer fella. One read a fair bit about him in the papers at one time, but nothing ever came of it. Adventurer in more than one sense, that’s your brother’s phrase, Syb. Good, that.’ He repeated it and laughed relishingly. ‘Twice Viola’s age, and deuced ugly. Looked like he never washed, and two puffs of woolly hair behind each ear. Nigger in him not so far back, I wouldn’t wonder. Wop, anyway. Don’t you think, Sadie?’ 

Lewis, lying on his back on the grass, wriggled and squeaked. Lord Alconleigh looked at him darkly, but clearly considered the antics of the smallest Foley too foolish for even unfavourable comment. For the second time that day, Robert felt the swell of tears. It was ridiculous. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t heard it all before, in the village, at school. But the taunts of ordinary people were one thing; the thoughtless contempt of those he had been brought up to regard as their, and his, superiors, quite another. 

‘It’s impossible to know,’ Lady Alconleigh said, shaking her head. 'Lucy’s benevolent streak was unfortunate. She saw herself as his patron. But one really couldn’t have foreseen it, not Before The War, anyway, it’s the sort of thing that happens all the time now, dukes’ daughters marrying—what was he—a— _fisherman_ ’s son, I think that was it, imagine, the smell, and of course in a way she lost Sebastian to it too, which was far worse, really. The boats in the harbour here are charming,’ she said vaguely and in Lady Foley’s approximate direction. ‘At a distance.’ 

‘Polar exploration sounds decent,’ Lewis said, propping himself on one elbow. ‘But I wouldn’t much care to marry a duke’s daughter. She might hold it over one, being a Hon. Rob would like to, though, wouldn't you, Rob?’ 

It was like being hit in the face by an unexpected wave, or losing a hold while climbing, Robert thought. In the moment of shocked disbelief everything seemed to freeze, cold and clear. And if you could manage not to freeze along with it it bought you time. The physical response that would have been natural and approved with his schoolmates, or even with Lewis alone, would give him away to these pretty ferocious grown-ups. He had to pretend it had nothing to do with him. 

He wrinkled his nose as you did for kissing bits at the pictures. ‘I shouldn’t mind who I married if she was—’ All the available adjectives seemed improbably soppy; his feeble ‘All right’ was fortunately lost in applause for the players coming off the court. 

‘Bad luck, brother,’ Lewis said delightedly. 

Rupert cuffed him gently and grinned. ‘Barbara Whatsit played jolly well.’ 

Robert wanted to offer his commiserations too, but before he could think what to say Rupert had moved on and Lewis was hauling him to his feet with an urgency that meant he was plotting mischief. 

The crow’s nest, notwithstanding its offences against good taste, was adjudged by Lewis a suitable place for a Council of War. Robert leaned against the telescope while Lewis sat sprawled against the rail. 

‘We can’t let him get away with it. He was beastly to Humphrey, too. He practically knocked him down, when he was only trying to help. He's fearfully miffed about the shiner: it's ruined him for the Vernons' dance.’ 

‘Why should you care? You’re beastly to Humphrey,’ Robert countered, with an only child’s obtuseness on the point. ‘And Humphrey is beastly to you.’ 

‘In the first place he’s my brother, and in the second place, he’s at Oxford and cleverer than all of us, so shut up.’ 

‘But—’ 

‘Anyway, Alconleigh’s obviously awful. He hates Germans and foreigners and coloured people, and that’s considered frightfully ill-bred, these days.’ 

‘He _is_ a lord—’ Robert said dubiously. 

‘Kind hearts are more than coronets, and something something Norman blood,’ Lewis pronounced. ‘You’re more of a gentleman than he is, if you look at it sensibly.’ 

Even in wary adulthood Robert would be susceptible to Lewis’s flattery; at eleven years of age he had no defences at all. ‘Papy and Mémé were from Brittany, actually. I suppose it’s close enough. What do we do, then?’ 

‘Well, it’s no good playing a joke on someone if he can be calm about it,’ Lewis said, an edge of rebuke in his voice. ‘So you have to pick a weakness.’ 

‘What’s his? Apart from foreigners.’ 

‘That’s hatred, not a weakness. But—wait up. It sort of is. He loathes going to people’s houses, and never stays the night. So—’ 

‘Put a spanner in the works. Make sure he can’t leave.’ 

‘Stick something up the exhaust pipe of his car.’ 

‘Doesn’t work. Siphon the petrol off.’ 

‘See sense. That would take ages, and where would we put the cans so they couldn’t find them? We’d be bound to get caught.’ 

‘Well—all right. I read it in a comic paper so I don’t know if it’s real. But apparently, if you put sugar in a petrol tank, it melts when the petrol warms up and turns it into fearful sludge. Stops the engine. It’d be right hard to clean out after, anyway.’ 

Lewis leapt to his feet, making the platform sway alarmingly. ‘That’s it! That’ll metagrobolize the old ogre!’ He grasped Robert’s shoulders and squeezed. 

Robert shrugged awkwardly. ‘Gerroff. And hang on a minute. We need to plan this properly, or they’ll suspect us right away. Alibis. The lot.’ 

Lewis tilted his head to gave one of his sly, secret smiles, but his half-closed eyes were puzzled under their astonishingly thick, dark lashes. ‘You’re a cold, calculating piece of goods, Robert Anquetil,’ he said for the first, but not for the last time. 

* 

As it happened, Robert was denied the chief pleasures of successful generalship. He abstracted a two-pound bag of sugar from the cool, shadowy dry-goods pantry and passed it to his accomplice waiting beside the coalshed; they both enjoyed misleading everyone as to the location of the other, and finally Lewis sauntered, to Robert’s eye too visibly suppressing an air of victory, from the old stable block. But the Alconleighs stayed on after Robert had to go to catch the omnibus from Farthing Fee. Lady Foley said he might keep the suit, and rather surprisingly, his father let him do so, with only a token mutter about Bloody Lady Bountiful. But having been granted a rare full day of leisure, he was kept hard at work in the house and on the smack for the next week, which was ample time to entertain anxieties about Constable Anstey coming to the door to arrest him for aiding and abetting a serious case of criminal damage. That wasn’t at all likely, he told himself sternly, but then he remembered stories he'd heard of boys who’d been sent to Borstal for much less—breaking into shut-up houses or playing silly beggars with shotguns—and felt sick again. 

It was nine days before he saw Lewis again: he made sure, as he always did on free afternoons, to be at Fitton’s Creek before two; Lewis would recce every day at that hour from the crow’s nest and join him if he were there. 

As Lewis approached, Robert knew from his bounding gait that all was well. They lay on their stomachs on the bank and startled the shoals of little fish. 

‘—it was absolutely the most delicious row. Oh Rob, I _wish_ you could have been there. The motor went about half a mile before it broke down, and the driver was going to walk back and ‘phone from our place, except Alconleigh insisted on coming with him, and practically sprinting. He only has one lung, did you know that, and he came steaming down the drive trumpeting like—like a woolly mammoth, but purple in the face. And then the Guv’nor rang up the garage in Byfleet to get it towed away, and sent our man to pick up Lady Alconleigh, and Billie looked up the trains in the ABC, but of course there wasn’t one that would get them back to Gloucestershire that evening, and when she told him that—quite simply all hell broke loose. They were in the entrance hall and it echoes like mad. You could hear him in the attics. The housemaids are still talking about it— _turned the air fair blue it did, my dear_ — 

Robert winced at Lewis’s unsteady mimicry. 

‘And he wouldn’t come down to dinner, just sulked upstairs all night, can you imagine, an old man like him, being such a kid? And they insisted that Ruddle take them to the station before breakfast. The Guv’nor said it was because he still wouldn’t come down and talk to us, but only ladies can have breakfast in their bedrooms. He must have been starving. It was blissfully funny. But the best bit was that a few days later the Guv’nor got a letter from him saying that the overhaul of the motor had cost ten pounds, and it had happened because of Unknown Granular Contaminants in the engine which must have been Introduced Under Our Roof—that was how he put it. And Pa just said, very cool, that ain’t necessarily so, you know, but you could tell he was fairly average worked up about practically being presented with a bill. And because, he said, it suggested that he’d employ people who weren’t completely honest—it was pretty much wigs on the green— 

An icy shiver ran over Robert’s scalp and down his spine. Why hadn’t he _thought_? The staff were always the first to be blamed when something like that happened. They’d lose their jobs at least; perhaps the police would be called. He gulped and stirred the water agitatedly. 

‘Did anyone? I mean, any of the people who work for you get into trouble?’ 

‘Not a chance. Why would you even think it? The Guv’nor’s a downy bird, wait till I tell you. Anyway, he said Billie wasn’t ever to invite Alconleigh again. We routed him, Rob! The superbity of us.’ He sighed contentedly. 

Robert put on a brave attempt at a smile, but he didn’t really feel all that superb. 

‘And then the Guv’nor called me into the business room, and I thought I was surely for the drop. But he just started jawing about Cicero, and asked me if I knew what _cui bono_ meant and of course I didn’t and then it was What Do They Teach Boys At School These Days, but it’s just when you work out whodunnit from who stands to get most out of it. Except he said that in the case of seeing Matthew Alconleigh discombobulated it doesn’t get you awfully far, because the field’s rather crowded, and he beetled his brows frantically and asked did I follow him. It was _smashing_.’ Lewis rolled on his back and kicked his legs lazily in the air. 

‘I don’t, quite. Follow, I mean. What was smashing about that?’ 

Lewis lowered his feet and flopped his head to one side in elaborate exasperation. ‘Oh, keep up. He guessed, you twit. That it was me—us. But he hates the old mastodon as much as we do, and there was no evidence. But now he has an excuse to cut him dead. So it was almost a congratulation, like in _Stalky_.’ He began to giggle and drummed his heels in a lying-down victory dance. ‘ _Ti-ra-ra-la-i-tu!_ I gloat! Hear me!’ 

Robert forced a laugh at first, but then it started to come naturally. What harm had been done, after all? A filthy rich old beast was out of pocket for what was to Robert’s ears a shockingly large sum of money, but he was, after all, filthy rich, and everyone seemed to think he deserved it. They rolled and jumped and span, gloating, and when they’d flopped down again, and caught their breath, Robert said, ‘But really, we should have our own gloat.’ 

‘Yes, that’s a decent notion. Any ideas?’ 

‘Dunno.’ A strange, needling impulse, both vengeful and self-punishing, leapt in him, and he added, ‘Let’s ours have proper words, not just yodelling. Like the ballad, the Fabian one, sort of.’ 

‘I’ve never tried to write a song. Do you know how?’ 

‘It can be pretty short. We’ll make up a line each. You have to go first though. Because Foleys have songs written about them.’ 

‘Idiot.’ Lewis punched him on the upper arm, but he clearly liked the idea of immortality. He fell silent for a moment, narrowing his eyes. 'What about—hm. What's a nuisance? How about,’ he sang to a wobbly, primitive melody, ‘ _Injuns on the railway—_?’

**Author's Note:**

> Elizabeth Hawkins' [map sampler](http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O70394/sampler-elizabeth-hawkins/#) really exists, and is in the collections of the V&A.
> 
> Uncle Matthew mistakes Robert for the son of Leonard Anquetil, a character in Vita Sackville-West's _The Edwardians_ , whose backstory is given thus: ‘My father owned a fishing-smack in a little village in Devonshire. I wanted to go to sea, but they sent me to school instead, and I was sensible enough not to run away. I am, you see, eminently sensible and practical. I worked hard; I had brains; I got a scholarship; I finally went to Oxford.' (Ahem, Miss Forest: there's homage and then there's the other thing.)
> 
> I am no sort of mechanic, but am reliably informed that the old sugar-in-the-petrol dodge _doesn't_ work in quite the way it's said to. Obviously the story requires that Lewis's prank does come off in some sense, and I hope that the Granular Contaminants fudge is enough to suspend readers' disbelief.


End file.
